A student at Morgan State University told police that he ate the heart and part of the brain of a man who lived in suburban Baltimore and had been missing for a week and whose dismembered body was found in the home the two men shared.

Alexander Kinyua, 21, an electrical-engineering student, was arrested May 31 after police searched his home in Joppatowne, Md., the Baltimore Sun reported. He was ordered held without bail during a court appearance. Investigators from the Harford County sheriff’s office say Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, went missing a week earlier and that they released a public announcement to locate him.

On May 29, Kinyua’s father told police that the student’s brother Jarrod found what he thought were human remains in the basement of their house. Jarrod told police he had discovered a human head and two human hands in the house’s laundry room. When Jarrod confronted his brother, Alexander said they were animal remains. Jarrod summoned his father, and they returned to the basement to find Alexander washing out the metal containers in which the body parts had been found.

Police went to the house and found the body parts, then interviewed Kinyua, who admitted he killed Agyei-Kodie with a knife and ate his heart and brain. He directed police to a nearby church, where they found the rest of the remains. Prosecutors asked a judge to hold Kinyua without bail because of the gruesome nature of the crime and because he could be considered a flight risk. (Kinyua is from Nairobi.) No motive was reported by police.

Kinyua had been involved with the ROTC program at Morgan State but was disenrolled after more than two years over a disciplinary incident, the Sun said. He was also charged with assault in an attack on another Morgan State student at a Baltimore apartment. The university was reportedly in the process of expelling him.

The case comes on the heels of an incident in Miami in which a 31-year-old man, Rudy Eugene, was shot to death by police who discovered him chewing the flesh off the face of a homeless man. In another incident, a New Jersey man threw part of his intestines at police after repeatedly stabbing himself.